High Desert Journal: Catching the Gap-Tooth Girl

Catching the Gap-Tooth Girl

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by Melissa Mylchreest | 0 Comments

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Like so many poems, this one grew out of a fleeting, snapshot image: a local bar, a local band, and out on the dance floor, a lone couple swing dancing. As the girl turned toward me, I caught a flash of her smile, broad, honest, gappy and unadorned. She seemed to have been spirited into that scene of neon and pint glasses from elsewhere, a separate place or time. Something about her, even in that brief moment, made me envision wind and wild weather, coulees and horses. After that one song she disappeared, and I've never seen her again.

I had been spending a lot of time thinking about the mythology of the American West; questions about the frontier, concepts of "Old West" and "New West," and what happens when reality and mythology jive — or more often, don't. Living in Montana, I've met a lot of folks from different walks of life — professors, real estate agents, ranchers, fly-fishing guides, waitresses, mechanics, down-and-out drifters, fabulously wealthy landowners — and I'm always fascinated to hear what Montana, and in turn, the West, really means to each of them. Often they'll make a sweeping gesture, "The mountains, the big sky, all of this." But they just as often talk about big ideas like freedom and wildness and escape, a land of possibility. When asked why I live here I say the same inarticulate things, and I think that wordless feeling is a big part of why we're all here.

Whether they're "real" or not, myths dictate the way we think about place, the stories we tell, and what we believe about ourselves and others. The West is a physical landscape, sure, but it's also a landscape of legend and lore, a landscape of imagination. I often find my writing straying towards those edges, where the tangible and imagined worlds meet, a position that demands I ask questions not just of the place I'm living, but of myself and my own motivations as well. It's a remarkably complex place, like the tumultuous boundary where a tributary joins a river: murky, deep, treacherous, and fertile.

It was with all this in mind that I sat down to write about the gap-tooth girl. I was in a traditional prosody class at the time, part of my MFA work at the University of Montana, and I believe we had been asked to write a poem in blank verse. (I could be wrong about that. There seem to be conspicuously few lines in the poem that are true iambic pentameter, so either I misremember the assignment, or I sort of botched it!) At any rate, I had embraced the prosody class after some initial misgivings about the prospect of writing sonnets and ghazals and sestinas. In fact, I found that I loved writing with a new formal constraint each week. It felt like I was setting my ideas down on a well-tended train track and opening the throttle, rather than sending them bouncing along the rutted dirt road of free verse, which is what I had been doing for years. This poem unveiled itself pretty quickly, and it was a real joy to write; not a lot of agonizing or reworking, and it wasn't until I got towards the very end that I was stymied.

I wrote the penultimate line, "the wind outside is making blizzard songs," and while I really liked the music of it, I knew I couldn't end there. I tried line after line, with all those grand, mythological ideas in my head, and everything sounded awful. But finally, and luckily, it dawned on me that this poem was as much about ignoring all that mulling and theorizing as it was about anything else, and anyway, the West itself doesn't really give a damn what we think about it! So, the last line settled into place, the West freeing itself from our petty pondering like some great, muscled beast shrugging off a fly.

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High Desert Journal

Winter

Catching the Gap-Tooth Girl

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